Wards and stakes can now enable live automatic subtitles for Zoom sacrament and other meetings, which may help Latter-day Saints who are deaf or hard of hearing participate better.
The free service is available for paid Zoom accounts but is not automatically enabled. Closed captions must be enabled from the Zoom website, not the app. Captions do not need to be enabled for each meeting occurrence.
- Go to the Zoom website: https://zoom.us/signin.
- Login to the account set up for the ward or stake. Go to Settings and select In Meeting (Advanced).
- Scroll to the Closed captioning section and move the slider to enable closed captions.
- Click the box that says, “Enable live transcription service to show transcript on the side panel in-meeting.”
Once those are enabled on the account, you will see a new button in the meeting controls of the Zoom app labeled Live Transcript.
To get live subtitles, the meeting host must click on this button and select enable auto-transcription for each meeting; it is never automatic.
Once the meeting host enables the subtitles, everyone will see them. Meeting participants can choose to view or hide subtitles through the Live Transcript button. The host can use the arrow on the side of the button.
The live transcription feature is available only in English, and accuracy depends on background noise, the volume and clarity of the speaker’s voice, and the use of lexicons and dialects specific to a geography or community. Names are often incorrectly transcribed.
As another option to the automatic captions, Zoom also allows you to use a third-party captioning service, or you can assign a meeting participant to provide the captioning manually. For more information, visit Zoom online support.